Game in the Brain

Mental 5S should have been one of the first things I learned growing up. Considering our mind as our primary workspace it means a lot to be able to keep it in order. Keeping my mind, my attention, in order would be one of the first things I should have learned growing up.

Sort. If I learned to sort, to define (example using the SMART criteria), and explore my ideas, my mental processes, my mental states and conditions, and when I’m being productive/in control or distracted (the two most key conditions) then I can begin my mental workspace optimization.

Part of Sort are the terms:

• Process
• Systems
• Models
• Heuristics
• Skills
• Familiarites
• Scope
• Knowledge. Knowledge is Predictive or Knowledge is being able to know what to do in certain conditions. Knowledge that does not meet any of those criteria can be forgotten (taken out of my scope)
• Distraction. Thinking of distractions a lot and what makes a distraction or creating a mental bucket/category for distraction helped me manage a lot of them. Having no category to sort “feelings” and ambiguous thoughts to they cluttered my mind. being able to define something as a distraction and set it aside helped a lot. I dont have a precise wording for distraction, I just use the category for anything that is not important right now lolz. it wasnt until I kept a notebook beside it at all times and wrote down what I needed to forget (so my notebook didn’t really hold notes but mental clutter lolz)

I realized that Gaming got me thinking in this processes. When ever I learn a new game system and I explore their skill mechanics its another “hypothesis” model of knowledge and Skill.

Set in Order. This is simply prioritization and evaluation of the various defined and identified elements in my mental workspace.

Standardize. Develope my Mental Processes, chunking comes to mind, where by I develop the processes by documenting them and exploring them outside my head and on paper or on a physical workspace. Each condition, process, and element has details about them (typically a project Charter that has been proceedurally learned).

Part of Standardize is Measuring. Learning my Listening Comprehension Speed 600wpm (in Google TTS), my Composition speed 5wmp, my transcription Speed 60wpm, and my speaking speed 200wmp (how slow I form ideas). My concentration endurance 4 hours (my ability to time travel lolz, losing all sense of time in an action lolz).

Shine. Having an improvement process. Well every activity needs some formalizing and measuring process so that it can be broken down to smaller chunks and “hacked” to work or work better.

Sustain. I consider this a design constraint: it must be in the form that I can procedural digest and exercise. Its also a goal, that I have “triggering” mechanisms that exercise or test my recall of the elaborate process and procedure.




Key Challenges
Dis-tractability. I’m highly distractable. Which means I can get lost in a tangent idea and will struggle to work my way back to the core topic. I model (guess) it as having a very fragile “Cache” of working memory that easily gets dumped.

Trade off. I think this explains my strange relationship with Long Term memory, I was diagnosed with amazing memory as a child while I was 8, (I perfected a memory test) I didnt really experience having such a memory that I could use competitively until I understood the concepts of Spaced Repetition which made so much more sense of what I had. Basically Distractability allowed me to “dump my attention cache” so that when I pulled a memory from long term I exercised the recall action.
So my Dis-tractability to Gaming created a set of skills that was embeded into my long term memory lolz. I could recall vast clusters of gaming material (as long as I maintained it with recall exercises according to Spaced Repetition limitations).

Gaming is my Spaced Repetition Trigger. As I use the same concepts in ideation and problem solving in thinking about gaming I create the conditions for a recall exercise.

My Kids. I hope I can figure out a way to teach my children to keep their  mental space in order. Giving them processes (one of many) would be the first step. A simple process that is Repeatable, Practical, and serving as an Example would be what I would need.